Collaboration between the former Mr Beta Band and a Super Furry Animal. Ciaran: “What has happened in established politics is nothing short of criminal, testing my faith in humanity. We see blatant, systematic rebalancing of the books, favouring private greed over public wealth, to ensure the deserving majority is left with nothing in favour of an immoral minority. The coalition has worked harder to protect this imbalance than anyone could have imagined, ruling through deception and fear. This is our response to those injustices and, in writing and releasing the tracks, ask that voters consider whether members of the political and business elite really have their best interests at heart.”

Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Taiye Selasi and Francine Prose are very clever people. Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, for example, is one of the most dazzlingly brilliant novels in years. So you would think that at least one of them could muster a justification for their decision to withdraw from the forthcoming PEN gala, at which Charlie Hebdo will receive the annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award, that wouldn’t make you want to bang your head against your desk. Apparently not.

Explanations have come in dribs and drabs. The longest, and worst, was published yesterday by Francine Prose — a former PEN President, no less. It opens with a classic case of the Liar’s But, where the whole paragraph preceding “but” is disingenuous blather: “tragic murders”, “nothing but sympathy”, “abhor censorship”, blah blah blah. This is the language of the politician, not the novelist, lacking both intellectual honesty and emotional truth. It’s only there to pay lip-service to the nine staff members murdered by Islamist gunmen on January 7 so that Prose can get on with the business of denigrating them.

At least she doesn’t indulge in victim-blaming to the grotesque extent that Garry Trudeau did recently, but she saves her most offensive claim till last. “The narrative of the Charlie Hebdo murders – white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists – is one that feeds neatly into the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East.” Narrative. Neatly. No doubt the victims would have preferred a more ambiguous story arc as long as it left them still breathing. The flipside of Prose’s claim is that the “narrative” is inconvenient for her. (Even in edited form: she fails to mention that copy editor Mustapha Ourrad was Algerian-French; that the Kouachi brothers also killed a maintenance worker and two police officers, one of whom was a Muslim; and that their friend Amedy Coulibaly murdered four customers in a kosher supermarket because they were Jewish.) Just because Islamophobes capitalised on the fact that Islamist extremists went on a killing spree, it doesn’t mean that Islamist extremists didn’t go on a killing spree. Prose is right to say that the murders were seized upon by people with an axe to grind and “many innocent Muslims have been tarred with the brush of Islamic extremism”. But all tragedies are politicised, and the subsequent opportunism doesn’t change the facts. This was a religious execution.

In his statement, Teju Cole brought up the Rushdie affair. “L’affaire Rushdie (for example) was a very different matter, as different as blasphemy is from racism. I support Rushdie 100%, but I don’t want to sit in a room and cheer Charlie Hebdo. This distinction seems to have been difficult for people to understand.” Leaving aside Cole’s contentious claim that the magazine was flat-out racist, it’s a distinction that the Kouachis themselves didn’t make. They weren’t machine-gunning cartoonists for the crimes of racism or Islamophobia. Even the most vile and unapologetic racists are very rarely murdered. No, they were punishing the crime of blasphemy. I’d be interested to learn of any other cases, in any other countries, in which PEN members have snubbed journalists who were murdered on this basis.

One of the great fallacies in the debate about Charlie Hebdo, articulated by Garry Trudeau, is the binary distinction between punching up and punching down, as if there were a ladder of power and a simple diagram to decide between “good” and “bad” satire. If you think the magazine was only attacking French Muslims, then it was punching down, but its obvious target was religious fundamentalism. In the era of Islamic State, Boko Haram and Wahhabism, it’s idiotic to equate religious extremism with powerlessness. Teju Cole listed some people he felt were more deserving of the award, including persecuted Saudi blogger Raif Badawi. Does he not realise that Badawi’s enemies are the same as Charlie Hebdo’s? If the Kouachis had been raised in Saudi Arabia rather than France, they would be the kind of men who would be flogging Badawi with enthusiasm. Outside of rock-solid dictatorships like North Korea, there is no force more brutally intolerant of freedom of expression.

So why does Prose believe Charlie Hebdo doesn’t deserve the award? “Our job, in presenting an award, is to honour writers and journalists who are saying things that need to be said, who are working actively to tell us the truth about the world in which we live.” Well, murderous extremism in the name of God is, unfortunately, a truth about the world in which we live. “That is important work that requires perseverance and courage.” OK. Even if you hate the Charlie Hebdo staff, you’d have to grant them those two qualities. But wait. “And this is not quite the same as drawing crude caricatures and mocking religion.” Why is this not the same? She doesn’t say. Pussy Riot made crude music and offended religious believers by performing in a church, but nobody boycotted their award last year. And isn’t there something insidious about suggesting that mocking religion is unworthy? Unnecessary? Progressives usually go to the barricades to insist that mocking religion is a valid form of freedom of speech.

I’ve genuinely been trying to understand why these six writers feel compelled to take a stand against Charlie Hebdo — why they cannot bear even to sit in the same room while the award is being presented. Perhaps they suspect that PEN is secretly led by racists and neocons with a grudge against Islam. Perhaps they really believe that the magazine, whose regular targets included the political elite and the Front National, was an intolerably racist enterprise. To illustrate the distinction between tolerating speech and endorsing it, Prose actually stooped to a comparison with neo-Nazis in Illinois; Deborah Eisenberg went further and mentioned Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer. There must be something that has led them to throw a basic principle under the bus. Jo Glanville, director of English PEN, clarified that principle in a blogpost yesterday:

Charlie Hebdo is in fact being recognised for its courage: the courage to publish in the face of threats and intimidation, and the courage to continue publishing after the shocking murders in January. We are more used to seeing that courage at a greater distance – in Mexico, Russia, Bangladesh or Egypt – and feel safe celebrating writers and journalists who may be prosecuted for outraging public morals in their own culture. On our own doorstep, when faced with a satirical publication that provokes and offends, there is an underlying view implicit in the protest of Peter Carey and fellow writers that this kind of speech is not worth defending.… Yet one of the most important, if uncomfortable, responsibilities for any free speech advocate is to defend the right to express speech which may be shocking, disturbing or offensive. Without that broad defence, the limits of everyone’s speech, as well as writers and publishers, are at risk of being restricted to suit the political agenda or prevailing morality, at a cost to artistic licence as well as individual freedom.

Charlie Hebdo is not being honoured because it was doing the bravest, most important work in the world — braver and more important than the work of Cole’s preferred candidates, including Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. It is not being honoured for its unfailingly progressive values and always punching in the “right” direction. It is being honoured because nine staff members and contributors were murdered in cold blood by fanatics who found their cartoons offensive. I struggle to come up with a definition of freedom of speech, or of courage, that doesn’t cover what they did, and the price they paid for it.

Salman Rushdie has sharply criticised the six. He knows full well what it’s like to not be the perfect poster-boy for freedom of speech. During the Satanic Verses affair, Roald Dahl, John le Carré and John Berger accused him of reckless arrogance and “insensitivity”. Former president Jimmy Carter called the novel “a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated”. Le Carré has since apologised and those attacks, levelled at a man facing a death sentence for writing a novel, now seem horribly misguided. Not because he wasn’t arrogant (he is rather) or insensitive (that was the point), but because they tried to make him less worthy of solidarity from fellow writers. It was the “wrong” kind of free speech, just as Charlie Hebdo’s is. Such criticisms are absolutely valid in the pages of the TLS or the NYRB but when lives are threatened or taken, the arithmetic changes. There’s an obligation to try to separate matters of taste from questions of principle.

My question for the six boycotters is this: if you cannot physically bear to sit in a room and show solidarity with people who have been murdered for drawing cartoons — murder being the most terminal form of censorship — then what is the point of belonging to PEN at all?

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen Whiplash yet, major plot points are revealed below so you might want to come back later.

I don’t know how Damien Chazelle got the money to make a psychological thriller about jazz drumming but I’m very glad he did. Whiplash, which I saw last night, depicts musicianship with an intensity that I’ve never seen in a movie about rock music: a symphony of whip-pans, zooms and rat-a-tat editing, spattered with sweat and blood. It’s also a tense moral fable about the nature of ambition. As with any good movie, its strengths are clarified when you consider the fiercest critiques.

In a typically entertaining screed, the New Yorker’s jazz-loving film critic Richard Brody said Whiplash “gets jazz all wrong”, but that’s to assume it is trying to get jazz “right”. “What x gets wrong about y” is one of my least favourite approaches to fiction anyway. Apocalypse Now is not an accurate representation of Vietnam, The Third Man takes liberties with post-war Vienna and I’m pretty sure The Shining misrepresents the hotel business. So what? Whiplash is not a Ken Burns documentary. As a visceral depiction of obsession and sadomasochism, it reminded me of Full Metal Jacket (“wrong” about war), Raging Bull (“wrong” about boxing) and Black Swan (“wrong” about ballet). It renders drumming as violent as hand-to-hand combat and presents a piece of music as something to be beaten into submission. The most ironic line in the movie is when JK Simmons’ tyrannical conductor Terence Fletcher tells his terrified band to “have fun”. Fun is not the point.

This is what bothers the “wrong about jazz” crew but I don’t think Whiplash claims that there’s only one way to play jazz, nor that there’s only one path to greatness. Chazelle himself used to be a hyper-competitive high-school jazz drummer (“It was a pretty narrowly focused life”) but he quit, so Whiplash is a personal what-if?. Rather than endorsing Fletcher’s monomaniacal vision, I think the director is examining it — following its brutal logic to the bitter end.

Nineteen-year-old prodigy Andrew Neimann (Miles Teller) is only vulnerable to Fletcher because he fundamentally agrees with him. His drumming idol is the showboating Buddy Rich, not a team player, and he is fixated on technique and stamina above all else. My other favourite recent movie about music is We Are the Best!, Lukas Moodysson’s story of three schoolgirl punks in 1980s Sweden (which, by the way, Richard Brody thought got punk all wrong). That’s about everything music can give you if you don’t have technical chops — camaraderie, catharsis, confidence — while Whiplash is only about the chops. Andrew’s achievement is athletic rather than artistic, with no indication that he has the creativity necessary for genius. Almost every music movie I can think of uses screaming fans to confirm the players’ brilliance. Here, we see a lot of practice but, if I remember rightly, only one shot of an audience, and a nonplussed one at that. Whiplash scythes away everything in music-making to do with pleasure and leaves only the hard work.

Jazz fans have pointed out that Fletcher’s favourite anecdote, about a teenage Charlie Parker being driven to genius after drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at his head, is false and Johnson only aimed it at his feet. He was trying to mock Parker, not kill him. Perhaps the mistake is indeed Chazelle’s, or perhaps the distortion is meant to give you a glimpse of Fletcher’s madness. The bully needs to reassure himself that bullying works.

The movie seduces us into a twisted value system while reminding us how twisted it is, creating a slippery dual perspective. Andrew’s single dad is either a loving, supportive mensch or a pitiable, ineffectual schmoe. Nicole, the indecisive college student whom Andrew dates, appears to fulfil that classic role in aggressively masculine dramas of the relationship-focussed woman who stands in the way of the man following the dream on which the narrative depends. But she is so sympathetically drawn that we cringe when Andrew disdains her lack of ambition and then dumps her because he absurdly assumes that a relationship is incompatible with musical greatness. In the dinner table scene, it’s funny when he mocks the high-school football heroes (his cousins? I missed the connection) for not being NFL-worthy but it’s also embarrassing and cruel because he thinks anyone who doesn’t have a shot at being the best is risible.

Several times, we are told that Andrew has no friends; he gazes more longingly at his photo of Buddy Rich than he does at any human being. When he risks life and limb to get to his final competition (for his sake, not the band’s), it’s clear he’s lost his mind. Ambition is the worm in Andrew’s soul, a moral corruption that draws him ever closer to a monster and gives him Randian contempt for anyone who doesn’t desire greatness at any cost.

In the bravura final sequence, during which my heart was pounding in double-time, Andrew veers from humilation to triumph. The audience in the cinema last night applauded. Whiplash resembles a sports movie to some extent but, unlike a sports movie, you cannot unambiguously win, so what kind of victory is it really? Andrew doesn’t give a shit about his bandmates (his long solo is pure selfishness) or the audience, only the approval of a brute. And Fletcher doesn’t care either. Is it an enjoyable show for anyone else? We never find out. The movie has reached its inevitable destination as a closed circuit of Andrew, Fletcher and the drumkit. Nothing else matters. Chazelle has said: “Fletcher’s mindset is, ‘If I have 100 students, and 99 of them are, because of my teaching, ultimately discouraged and crushed from ever pushing this art form, but one of them becomes Charlie Parker, it was all worth it.’ That’s not a mentality I share, but in many ways, that’s the story of the movie.”

And so, fully corrupted at last, Andrew has become Michael Corleone closing the door at the end of The Godfather. Two crucial questions are left open for the viewer. Where does he go from here? Fletcher’s icons of achievement, Charlie Parker and his trumpet-playing former protégé, both died young because they had mastered music but not life. And are Fletcher’s standards correct or is Andrew nothing more than a spectacular technician?

For me, neither question has an uplifting answer. Andrew’s tragedy is that would rather be a great musician than a good person. The kicker is that he might not even be a great musician.

The Paris killings have been discussed so widely and relentlessly that I didn’t intend to add my voice with yet another blogpost but I’ve found myself so busy on multiple Facebook threads that I thought I should pull my thoughts together here.

I’ve been genuinely alarmed by some of the responses to the killings. Not the Islamophobic ones which demanded that ordinary muslims prove themselves by condemning the murders. As a white man who is never, ever asked to stand up and condemn crimes by white men, I think they’re insulting, intimidating and absurd, but I expected those.

My disappointment is with a number of voices on the left who, in the days after the massacre, raced to talk about everything except the fact that people had been murdered by religious fanatics because of cartoons. It’s not irrelevant that the gunmen had been radicalised by crimes such as the Iraq war and Abu Ghraib, or that Islamophobia is a growing problem, or that the world leaders who marched in Paris were all, to varying degrees, hypocrites when it comes to protecting freedom of speech. (In fact, I think that this is an important opportunity to examine and address those hypocrisies.) But I did get itchy reading articles that wanted to talk about everything except the main event, as if to condemn the gunmen without qualification was somehow to play into the hands of Islamophobes and sabre-rattlers.

I like the slogan “Je Suis Charlie” because it suggests simple solidarity with victims of an appalling crime. Friends who reject it, and the numerous columnists who have said “Je ne suis pas Charlie”, believe that it means more than that — unreserved endorsement of Charlie Hebdo’s content — although, given that the magazine has been running since 1970, with countless staff members and contributors over the years, I find this assumption bizarre. I don’t need to rubber-stamp every page before I can voice my solidarity. Every publication that I read or write for has published some material I vigorously disagree with but I would stand by every single one in a case as extreme as this. Still, each to their own interpretation. Nobody should feel bullied into supporting a slogan.

What I found really hard to swallow was the number of people who, after the obligatory “Of course this is a shocking crime but…” opener, confidently described Charlie Hebdo as racist, including Richard Seymour (“a racist institution”), Jacob Canfield (“incredibly racist”) and Gawker’s Maria Bustillos (“trafficked in hateful images and ideas that often tracked uncomfortably closely with the ultragarbage peddled by the fascistoid National Front”). I’ll take it as read that nobody thinks even the most vile drawings deserve to be punished with gunfire but branding them racists so quickly, with so little evidence, is no small matter. No wonder that the French left, to which Charlie Hebdo belonged, has been shocked by some of its anglophone comrades throwing the magazine under the bus.

These claims were backed up by examples of Charlie Hebdo’s work, presented as if they were self-explanatory. Cartoons aimed at a small audience intimate with minor episodes in French politics were being wrenched out of context and held up as racist by people outside France who had no way of understanding what the cartoons were referring to. Charlie Hebdo’s provocative, impacted, in-crowd style makes it very easy to misread if you weigh in before taking time to check the facts.

When I first saw the Boko Haram panel that cartoonist Tom Humberstone cites as a straightforward example of “punching down”, I thought it was inexplicably offensive so I wanted to find out what the hell it was trying to say. It is in fact pointing out the hypocrisy of French conservatives condemning Boko Haram’s mistreatment of kidnapped girls while trying to remove welfare benefits from refugees seeking asylum in France. The pro-welfare magazine is lampooning the myth that vulnerable migrants are “welfare queens”, not cosigning it. (Vox’s Max Fisher explains it well here, comparing it to the New Yorker’s controversial 2008 Obamas cover, which also appears racist if you don’t know the background. Worth noting that Ricochet’s Leigh Phillips has yet another reading: “a clunky ‘first-world problems’ commentary on complaints over the French government restricting child benefits for top earners, suggesting that rich French people really have nothing to complain about compared to people’s travails in northeast Nigeria.”)

Likewise, the cartoon depicting Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who is black, as a monkey horrified me until I learned that it was an attack on the National Front politician who made that comparison, the National Front being Charlie Hebdo’s favourite target.

Now you could argue, and I would, that using racist caricatures in the service of an anti-racist message is self-defeating and offensive, and that the magazine should have thought a lot harder about it depicted muslims and black people. (The closest comparison in music would be the Dead Kennedys’ Holiday in Cambodia. Satirising the mindset of privileged white college students, Jello Biafra included the line, “Bragging that you know how the niggers feel cold.” He soon decided that the ugliness of that word undermined the song and changed the line in all subsequent performances.) But you owe it to the dead cartoonists to understand their intent before crying racist.

On one level, this is just bad reading. Rule one of satire is that if something looks extremely objectionable at first glance then there’s a fair chance that it’s critiquing those objectionable attitudes. Jello Biafra didn’t really want to kill the poor and Randy Newman didn’t truly despise short people. Worse than that, it betrays a willingness to assume the worst and believe that Charlie Hebdo was the kind of magazine that mocked kidnapped Nigerians or compared black people to monkeys. When we’re talking about murder victims, such bad faith is deeply insulting and is a travesty of left-wing values.

As Leigh Phillips’ writes: “These otherwise well-meaning but non-French-speaking knights-in-social-media-armour have embarrassed themselves by spouting off about things they know not quite enough about. This is not clear-headed thinking. This is not leftist or anti-racist thinking.”

You don’t have to like these cartoons. I find many of them, like 90% of political cartoons to be frank, neither funny nor revealing. And as a fairly laidback British atheist, I struggle to understand the ferocity of French anti-clericalism. But even the ones depicting Mohammed (vastly outnumbered by those attacking the National Front and the French establishment) have a range of tones and targets that make a simple “punching up versus punching down” binary impossible. If you attack muslims en masse, you are punching down. If you attack extremists, some of whom run countries, you are punching up. In a single-panel cartoon, the difference is not always clear.

What the academic Danah Boyd calls “context collapse” is the root of a thousand Twitterstorms. When comments or jokes intended for one audience are read by another the misreadings can be dramatic. Sarcasm and ambiguity don’t travel well. This is a hazard of our age but when the people whose work we’re analysing have been gunned down, surely the least we can do is to take the time to understand what they were trying to say.

“After a grand jury didn’t indict a Ferguson, Mo., police officer last month in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, D’Angelo called his co-manager Kevin Liles. “He said: ‘Do you believe this? Do you believe it?’ ” Mr. Liles said. “And then we just sat there in silence. That is when I knew he wanted to say something.”” – New York Times, December 17, 2014

The big story in protest music in 2014 can be summed up in one word: Ferguson. And by Ferguson I don’t just mean the death of Michael Brown, but those of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, and the gut-wrenching reminder that in America black lives are valued less than white ones. It shocked hip hop into its biggest spasm of civic responsibility since Hurricane Katrina. Rappers stopped worrying about self-identifying as political (read: preachy, boring, not commercially viable) and stepped up without hesitation.

I’ve already come across New National Anthem by TI, the Nina Simone-influenced Black Rage by Lauryn Hall, Don’t Shoot by The Game and others, War Cry by Tef Poe, Tell the Children by Tink, Be Free by J Cole, We Gotta Pray by Alicia Keys and Hands Up by Yakki Divoshi. Don’t Shoot, named after a Ferguson hashtag and placard slogan, stands out because its sheer manpower allows for a range of responses, from Diddy’s thoughtful restraint to Swizz Beatz’ bleak despair to Problem’s vengeful fury. Amid references to Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Fuck Tha Police, Curren$y’s “I’m a resident of a country that don’t want me” cuts deepest.

Those are just the songs intended to be about Ferguson. As D’Angelo’s quote demonstrates, the crisis transformed the meaning and purpose of existing songs. When Vince Staples tweeted “Hands Up is not about Ferguson”, I felt like replying, “Well, that’s what you think.” I was reminded of a quote from DH Lawrence in Greil Marcus’s The History of Rock’n’Roll in 10 Songs: “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.” Hands Up wasn’t written about Ferguson the place, Ferguson the crisis, but it’s about what the name Ferguson now represents. Likewise Run the Jewels’ heart-wrenching Early: “I apologise if I got out of line sir/Cause I respect the badge and the gun/And I pray today ain’t the day that you drag me away/Right in front of my beautiful son.” For D’Angelo, Ferguson recontextualised Black Messiah, an album which sometimes attains the humid density of There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and made its rush-release a necessary response. He wanted the album to reflect “anarchy and urgency and revolution”. So when Questlove posted on Instagram, calling for songs that “speak truth”, I felt that these songs were already out there.

The best of them feel fresh and alive in a way that Band Aid 30’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? did not. This lumbering anachronism reminded me of attending 2007’s Live Earth, the massive benefit concert that was forgotten even as it was happening: the last gasp of an outmoded form.

Under fire from the likes of Damon Albarn, Fuse ODG and even Emeli Sande, who sang on the record, Bob Geldof proved unable to accept that pop music, the media and the world have changed, and immune to humility or self-awareness. His belligerent defence of the redemptive power of good intentions was forgivable in 1984 because the concept was new and its strengths outweighed its flaws. Thirty years later, nobody needs a pop song to tell them about ebola. I’m prepared to believe that it raised awareness of the epidemic among the very young but mostly it just raised awareness of the redundancy of the all-star benefit single. (I had high hopes for another multi-vocal effort, Rookie Magazine’s Go Forth, Feminist Warriors, because it featured people like Carrie Brownstein, Aimee Mann and Tegan & Sara but unfortunately this “feminist We Are the World” is terrible. At least Do They Know It’s Christmas? is catchy.)

Some of the year’s most outspoken rock musicians were from the original Band Aid/We Are the World generation. On High Hopes, Bruce Springsteen enlisted Tom Morello to beef up two of his finest protest songs, 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad and 2000’s American Skin (41 Shots), the latter about – plus ca change – the police murder of an unarmed black man. On U2’s Songs of Innocence, Bono stopped trying to throw his arms around the world and drew a tight bead on the Ireland of his youth: the violence of political fanatics (Raised By Wolves) and the complacent cruelty of abusive priests (Sleep Like a Baby Tonight). It’s a shame that the album’s controversially vast iTunes data dump distracted from the powerful intimacy of the words.

Morrissey’s World Peace Is None of Your Business showed that a strong melody can redeem a ham-fisted lyric. Even as I couldn’t get it out of my head, I wondered how he could bundle together protest movements in countries as different as Egypt, Brazil, Ukraine and Bahrain and empathise with the victims of autocrats while rubbishing the right to vote. Small wonder that he is good friends with Russell Brand. Elbow’s The Blanket of Night took the opposite tack, tenderly sketching a scene of two asylum-seekers on a stormy sea. Compassion for ordinary lives can be more effective than raging vaguely against the powerful. The year’s biggest surprise came from Paolo Nutini, an MOR soulboy reconfigured, on Iron Sky, as an urgent revolutionary idealist, making excellent use of Charlie Chaplin’s famous “machine minds” speech from The Great Dictator.

Iron Sky’s dystopian video is just one example of how visuals can emphasise and expand lyrics. The clip for John Grant’s Glacier used the singer’s deeply personal account of the impact of homophobia as an opportunity to chart the history of the gay rights movement, to emotionally overwhelming effect. The pansexual love-in depicted in Annie’s Russian Kiss video made it an even more joyous riposte to Putin’s anti-gay laws during the Sochi Olympics. Holly Herndon’s Home, a break-up song addressed to her computer, was a witty sideways take on the mass surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden.

Canadian country singer Kira Isabella’s Quarterback doesn’t necessarily read as a protest song but it should. I’ve said before that the only thing I’d change about 33 Revolutions Per Minute is to redraw the parameters of what constitutes a feminist protest song. I underserved personal songs with broad resonance that didn’t present themselves as movement anthems. Quarterback is such a song.

Isabella describes a nightmarish inversion of an early Taylor Swift scenario, in which a timid geek hooks up with a football hero in the most horrific way. As the title and chorus indicate, the real target isn’t the rapist but the high-school caste system that allows him to get away with it by disbelieving his victim. As Katherine St Asaph wrote in a brilliant review, “it’s also a song about popularity, and who we deem to matter”.

Originally written in the first person, Quarterback is far more disturbing in the third. Isabella’s neutral delivery, cracking only on the line “when she saw the pictures on the internet,” suggests that she could be one of the complicit bystanders. A stronger singer might have overplayed the indignation, tipped the song out of the everyday and into melodrama, made it obvious from the start where it was going. The video betrays the song’s toughness by ending with a cathartic scene in which the rapist is exposed. The lyric allows no such happy ending. It’s about trying to live at the very bottom of a crushing power structure. And it shows that great songwriting can bottle a major issue in a single story that leaves you stunned.

Here are my Top 20 albums and singles of the year. And here’s a link to my Spotify playlist of roughly 100 songs I enjoyed in 2014.

“The press continued to treat John with undisguised hostility. The Times objected, in its ruling-class fashion, to the “unfortunate image of hippy earnestness directing liberal causes from the deep upholstery of a Beatle’s income.”

The Daily Mirror’s abuse was more flamboyant. It ran a headline naming John “Clown of the Year” at the end of 1969. “John Lennon means well,” the tabloid began. “But it is not what goes on in his mind, rather what comes out of the mouth, that sets Mr Lennon slightly apart from his fellow human beings. And out of that particular mouth this year has emerged the most sustained twaddle and tosh since Zsa Zsa gave way to Cassius Clay.” Reviewing the period that began with the nude Two Virgins cover and ended with the Hanratty campaign, the Mirror found the bed-in the most outrageous. “That fatuous affair” had been based on “the notion that the contentious forces of mankind would pause in awe of this nut-nibbling couple in old Amsterdam.” The article concluded, “Mr Lennon’s cry is ‘Peace!’ How about giving us some, chum?”

Source: Jon Wiener – Come Together: John Lennon in His Time

There are many differences between the two men – only one, for example, ranks among the greatest artists of modern times and it’s not the one who was in the remake of Arthur – but the tone of the loftiest hatchet jobs on Russell Brand feels awfully familiar.

In recent weeks, most people I know have been thrown into a funk by Ukip’s apparent invulnerability. Attacking them feels like wrestling smoke or having a dream in which you try to run but your feet turn to lead. Ridicule doesn’t work. Exposing candidates as racists, Islamophobes, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists or crackpots who thinks pro-Europe politicians should be hanged for treason doesn’t work. Perhaps it even enhances their cachet as plucky anti-establishment renegades who say the unsayable, though that’s no reason to stop. They get knocked down. They get back up again. They’re still favourites to win tomorrow’s elections. What can be done?

I think Ukip’s critics should be careful with words. The party is not, despite what many people say, fascist, unless you drastically reinterpret the word to mean “right-wing and nasty”. Its members are not all racists. Some are even non-white (although one of those, former youth leader Sanya-Jeet Thandi, recently quit the party and accused it of appealing to the “stupidity of ignorant anti-immigrant voters for electoral gain” and “giving positions in the party to people with racist views”). People who make hateful generalisations about Eastern Europeans are particularly keen to say they can’t be racist because their targets are white. That’s why Farage can say he wouldn’t want Romanian neighbours and get away with it whereas if he said the same about West Indians he’d be toast.

Again and again, discussions of racism get derailed by a false binary: one is either a racist or not a racist. In reality, one can be racist towards certain groups and not others. One can count people of colour as friends but be instinctively prejudiced towards any who are strangers. One can even consider oneself anti-racist and still make certain subconsciously racist assumptions. The anti-racism movement has succeeded in making people horrified of being accused of racism but not in making them not be racist. We’ve reached a point where anything short of being caught in the act of burning a cross on someone’s lawn can be hotly denied. Many will insist “I don’t have a racist bone in my body”, clearly subscribing to the orthopedic theory of racism. (“Congratulations. The operation was a complete success. We’ve removed the fibula that didn’t want immigrants living next door and now you’re racism-free.”)

I don’t want to go down that road so let me just point out that Ukip supporters are older and whiter than the average voter and disproportionately obsessed with immigration. 92 per cent of them agree that “mass immigration is making parts of the UK unrecognisable and like a foreign land” while 51 per cent agree that “The Government should encourage immigrants and their families to leave Britain (including family members who were born in Britain).” This isn’t just about Brussels. Farage can keep insisting that the only issue is Europe but his anti-immigrant button-pushing makes his pantomime of puzzled disappointment with the party’s barmier members look comically disingenuous. Bigots in Ukip? Gosh, how can that be? He’s like a man who walks around with a string of sausages hanging from his back pocket and then complains when dogs chase him.

The wave of recent mini-scandals may have deterred a few floating voters but it’s left only a minor dent. Some candidates are swivel-eyed extremists? It doesn’t matter. Their facts are distorted and their predictions wrong? It doesn’t matter. They’ve disowned their 2010 manifesto and refuse to specify any policies beyond leaving Europe? It doesn’t matter. They’re so reliant on one man that trying to name another Ukip member who appears reasonable and halfway professional is a very short game? It doesn’t matter. They’re seeking election to a parliament they don’t believe in, which, as we’ve seen from the activities of anti-state Tea Party congressmen in the US, is a recipe for fractious inertia that helps nobody? It doesn’t matter. They’re chummy with some of Europe’s most unsavoury fringe parties? It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because Ukip are less a political party than a mood. As the Spectator’s Alex Massie suggests, Farage’s appeal is the flipside of Russell Brand’s. Disgust with mainstream politics, globalisation and, in many cases, immigrants has created an angry bubble so impervious to facts that it strays into conspiracy theories: 67 per cent of Ukip voters said they were more likely than the average Briton to feel “alienated”. Farage obscures his lack of ideas in a mist of simplistic rhetoric and phoney rebellion that’s attractive to people sick of the dreary slog of politics as usual. While the other parties talk about tough choices, Farage makes it easy. Leave Europe, pull up the drawbridge and Britain will be magically restored to whatever cock-eyed, Sunday-night-TV golden age you carry around in your head.

Some of their voters’ deeper worries are understandable, which is why they’re wooing Labour voters as well as estranged Tories, but the solution (send ‘em back home and close the door) is as bogus as it is pernicious. Unfortunately, this is how right-wing populist parties shape the national conversation. First, they exaggerate the downside of immigration and gather a following. Then the media and mainstream parties feel obliged to respond by buying into the exaggeration and catering to “valid concerns”, regardless of whether those concerns are grounded in fact. Usually, voters who are obsessed with immigration decide to stick with the party that serves its bigotry undiluted but by then the issue has been artificially inflated and something must be done. No party leader can dare to say that he refuses to respond to this largely illusory crisis.

The media, always in the market for a telegenic wag, has inflated Farage’s importance and thus his support. The same outlets that wrung their hands over whether to give Nick Griffin a platform have rolled out the red carpet for Farage, even though Ukip deputy chairman Neil Hamilton has said that his party attracts “decent” and “non-racist” BNP voters who feel “swamped” by immigration (ah yes, the famous non-racist BNP voter) and Griffin himself has accused Ukip of “using all of our rhetoric, they are using our slogans, they are recycling our posters and people like it”. Even now that the media is, belatedly, giving Farage a harder time, he has all the publicity he needs.

I’d like to think that the negative press will make some dyspeptic voters tempted to go for Ukip as a protest vote think again once they realise they’re joining some very unpleasant company. Like most countries, Britain has a proportion of incorrigible hardcore racists but not enough to explain Ukip’s poll ratings. Come the general election, when Ukip will have to break their strategic silence on policy and articulate a vision for the economy, education and so on, its coalition of malcontents will be hard to sustain. Truly successful parties are sustained by groundwork, pragmatism and attention to detail, not hot air and hating stuff. Moods are powerful and unstoppable until they pass, and this one will pass.

For now, the only course of action left if you dislike Ukip and the side of Britain that they represent is to turn out and vote. Sorry if that sounds condescending. Angry people with the wind at their heels certainly will, and the bored and disillusioned will allow them to exaggerate their importance. (If Russell Brand’s anti-voting stance seemed unhelpful last year it feels actively destructive now.) You can’t build a lasting political party on anger and prejudice but you can still cause a lot of damage.

Thanks to @davidwearing, whose Twitter feed has been a valuable source of links and statistics.

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DORIAN LYNSKEY is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, published by Faber and Faber (March 2011) and Ecco (April 2011). He writes for the Guardian, The Word, Q, Spin and Empire.